The money that you allocate for marketing is one of the most crucial investments a business can make. You could have the best service or product in the world but without the right marketing, potential customers won’t know you exist.
From form fills to click-throughs, results are the key to your company’s success. In order to get them you need to stand out from the crowd and engage the right audience.
Maybe your Instagram posts aren’t getting the engagement you’d like or your Facebook ads aren’t converting, and your newsletter open rate has gradually gone stale. Perhaps you can’t even find your website on the first [or second] results page when your potential customers search for your services.
If your company lacks the knowledge and experience to sustain its own marketing department, outsourced marketing can be a cost-effective way to bolster your marketing efficiency.
In this guide, we explore how outsourced marketing can ensure your digital success and help you grow your business and answer burning questions around outsourcing, including:
- The potential of outsourced marketing strategies
- The role of outsourced marketing in your business
- In-house vs. outsourced marketing
- The various kinds of outsourced marketing solutions
- The benefits of outsourcing marketing.
How can outsourced marketing support your business?
Outsourced marketing can help you gain a broad range of expertise that may not be possible with an in-house marketing department. You can benefit from specialist skills such as SEO, content creation, email marketing and graphic design, led by a killer strategy.
Many marketing agencies offer a combination of specialised services that you can pick and choose from and customise to mix for your company. This means that, typically, outsourced marketing can be more cost-effective when you only pay for individual services rather than employing a full-time team member or an entire team. It’s ideal for businesses with lighter marketing requirements, or those needing a different set of skills to support their efforts, because outsourcing individual services can help save on the costs of employing a full-time team member.
If budget is a key consideration, outsourced marketing really works in your favour. But it’s also incredibly beneficial for larger companies, by helping them better forecast their marketing budget and roadmap the journey to achieving business objectives.
Look for things like:
- Marketing strategy
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Social media strategy and management [especially video marketing]
- Website design
- Copywriting services, including blogs, newsletters and email marketing
- SEO.
If it’s missing any of these, it’s likely not to be rounded enough for the needs of your growing business.
What is the difference between in-house vs. outsourced marketing?
In-house marketing usually involves a small team led by a head of marketing, or a single marketing manager if your requirements are less demanding.
Outsourced marketing involves using an external agency to manage your marketing activities. They’ll either take the reins on your entire strategy or simply assist with a few specialist areas, such as managing your social media ads or remarketing campaigns.
Typically when comparing in-house vs. outsourcing marketing, outsourced marketing is usually more cost-effective as you only pay for the services you use rather than an entire marketing department. So if your budget is limited or a key consideration, then outsourced marketing could be the better option for you.
Even with an in-house marketing team, you can still outsource certain services, like SEO and website development, when additional specialist knowledge and skills are required.
What are the benefits of in-house marketing?
It embeds marketing in your culture
If you have an internal marketing team, they’re able to represent the best interests of your company from a marketing perspective. This involves reporting on which posts your audience engages most with and which demographics make up your target audience.
It’s an investment in your brand
By cultivating an in-house team, you have access to marketers whose role is to execute your marketing strategy in line with your overall business plan. Think of them as your brand guardians.
Quick turnaround
By operating your communications and activities internally, your business can produce marketing work as and when it’s needed, as your staff are on-call throughout the working day. So, if your business attends events and likes to post reactively, this process is slightly simpler.
… And the drawbacks
Limited perspective
By embedding themselves in your business, in-house marketers can also lose the objectiveness required to identify any issues and obstacles. Without the perspective of what works beyond your current activities, it’s hard to think outside the box and move your brand forward.
It can be expensive
Having a strong internal team in place is central to the success of your in-house marketing activities. Hiring the right team can be a lengthy [not to mention costly] process, so be prepared to wait longer to see a return on this investment in your leads generated and conversions.
Lack of varied expertise
Perhaps the biggest appeal of opting for a marketing agency is the variety of expertise across all areas of marketing, from web development to graphic design. When you hire an in-house team or marketing lead, they tend to oversee all the digital functions within your marketing strategy. But no matter how experienced they are, they won’t be an expert in all these key areas and can’t match the performance of an agency’s services.
What are the benefits of outsourcing marketing?
Leverage industry links and advanced tools
One of the main benefits of outsourcing marketing is working with an agency that has access to the very best marketing tools and technologies. Whether these are analytics tools, automation software or research tools for keyword analysis, your business will benefit from them without the expense of purchasing new technologies for your in-house team.
The nature of networking in the marketing industry means that agencies have several vendors and professionals that they connect with. Through these contacts, you have a greater variety of services and products in the mix.
Access to diverse perspectives
When you partner with an outsourced marketing agency, they bring a wealth of creative insights and innovation to your marketing efforts. With a focus on key performance metrics, they can review and analyse performance to determine the results of your marketing efforts. From this, they can also identify the strengths and USPs of your business to ensure your marketing strategy resonates with your target audience.
With specialists in search engine performance, web design, copywriting and strategy, an agency can provide many different approaches to strengthening your marketing strategy. These approaches are informed by specialist knowledge and varied experience, which opens up a lot of potential for your business.
If you’re [especially] lucky, you’ll get your very own dedicated brand manager who oversees all your marketing activities. Think of your brand manager as your outsourced marketing director, providing clarity over your strategy so that you can focus on running your business without the headache of managing marketing campaigns.
Accountability [and results]
When you outsource your marketing activities to an agency, you’re paying them to deliver on a number of performance indicators. It’s their job to help you reach your goals more efficiently and exceed them, with regular reporting on your performance and results. While it may not be cost-effective to develop an in-house marketing team with all the skills you need, it is achievable through outsourced marketing.
Free internal capacity
Outsourced marketing takes the stress of implementing a successful marketing strategy off your hands. Your agency will follow the strategy that you design [or create one for you] and work alongside your team to review its success. By executing your marketing activities on your behalf, outsourcing allows you to focus on managing the complex internal operations within your business.
Scale at speed
Outsourcing marketing helps to support your business and encourage its growth. You can call on an outsourced marketing agency for bespoke strategies that help you capture seasonal opportunities and reach your goals throughout the year. As demand for marketing activity increases, you can better manage the capacity of your internal team.
Whether it is a special promotion or seasonal campaign, your outsourced marketing agency can scale its support to meet your needs.
A fresh set of [expert] eyes
As an extension of your business, an outsourced marketing agency focuses on the key metrics that indicate how successfully your current marketing efforts are working. They’ll identify the strengths and USPs of your offering, design a strategy that highlights these across your available channels, and explore under-utilised areas.
At Ketchup, we go one step beyond the analytics. We bring in the creative skills of our design and copywriting teams to ensure that whilst your content performs well, it also has you looking your best. Don’t just take our word for it – have a look at some of our [impressive] case studies.
Enhanced performance metrics and analytics
Another one of the benefits of outsourcing marketing activities to an agency is that you’re paying them to deliver on a number of performance indicators. It’s their job to help you reach your goals more efficiently and exceed them, with regular reporting on your performance and results.
A flexible approach
In business, no two days are the same. With the purchasing of products and services influenced by the financial market, emerging trends and seasonal demand, marketing activities also fluctuate similarly. To allocate your marketing budget effectively, you need to be able to similarly dial your services up or down as needed. That’s exactly what outsourcing is designed for.
Maybe one month you’d like to run a social media campaign with additional paid ads, or you’d like some extra graphic design services to create print collateral for your Christmas event. When you outsource your marketing activities to an agency like Ketchup, you also have the bonus of increasing or decreasing the number of services you require, [you’re welcome].
Explore the benefits of outsourcing marketing in more detail.
… And the drawbacks
They won’t always tell you what you want to hear
Marketing agencies cultivate experts across all aspects of the marketing process to ensure they’re optimising your campaigns. With their insights into processes, technicalities and tools, their perspective will vary from your own in places.
This may mean that they want to lead your business down a new route previously unexplored, and learning to trust their direction can take time.
Finding the right fit
Clearly identified KPIs, increased conversion rates and strengthened branding are just some of the magical effects of successful marketing. To achieve them with an outsourced marketing agency, you need to find an agency that understands [and delivers] what your business needs.
Not all marketing agencies will have an approach that works for you, so you’ll have to align your goals, challenges and capabilities to get the most out of your agency.
What to look for when searching for outsourced marketing services
A [diverse] range of services
Whilst many marketing agencies specialise in digital marketing services like social media marketing and pay-per-click advertising, they may not offer internal design and copywriting services.
Whether you require these specialist services right now or not, it’s beneficial to have the option to add additional services to your marketing strategy. For example, if you decide to redesign your logo down the line or enhance your copywriting with storytelling. Ensuring your outsourced marketing agency offers every service, from website design to email marketing, is highly advantageous.
When looking for an outsourced marketing agency, it’s crucial to partner with an agency that can manage the whole process from strategy to execution.
The ability to scale with your business
Placing your marketing activities in the hands of an external agency requires a great deal of trust and this needs to be supported by expertise [and results]. It’s important to approach an agency with a clear idea of what your goals are, such as whether you’d like to increase brand awareness or focus on your digital engagement.
You should aim to pinpoint your business objectives in the early discovery stage and the KPIs you’re looking to achieve, as well as the pain points that need addressing.
This is the beauty of outsourcing marketing services to an agency, as you can pick and choose how best it supports your changing needs and it can help you scale your digital presence. Regardless of how you use it, an outsourced marketing agency is a powerful tool.
Transparency and communication
Staying on budget is essential, so agreeing on a monthly fee in your initial contract ensures that there are no surprise bills down the line. The beauty of outsourcing marketing to a team of experts is that even if you require ad-hoc marketing activities for a campaign, this can be charged separately.
Transparency in your marketing spend provides peace of mind and helps you to understand exactly where your activities are being directed. That’s exactly why a Ketchup marketing strategy accounts for every last penny, for full transparency of your marketing budget.
Be sure to choose an agency where communication is a priority, so that they’ll keep you in the loop with updates on your campaign performance using weekly meetings and monthly reports. At Ketchup, these monthly meetings and reports help to keep our client relationships strong and evolve our strategies to meet their ever-changing needs.
Clear measures of success
From the outset, it’s crucial to set clear KPIs and metrics that can be used to measure the success of the partnership. It’s good practice to perform an initial report on your marketing performance, so you have a benchmark to measure against.
While it is important to note that not all marketing techniques will work, it is important that your outsourced marketing partner measures and reports on performance. Based on these findings, they should also make recommendations on how to adapt the strategy and improve results.
Quality control: balancing control and expertise
Sometimes your in-house marketing team can be too close to the business and can lose sight of the objectiveness that allows them to identify any barriers. This can make it hard to achieve real marketing results and could hold your business back.
But when we look at in-house vs. outsourcing marketing, the latter can deliver higher quality content and better marketing results. Not only will the agency have access to a wide range of skill sets, but they also possess the expertise in ideation and execution, which opens up a lot of potential for your business.
Scalability and flexibility
In-house vs. outsourcing marketing approaches can differ in terms of scalability and flexibility. In-house marketing can be slow to adapt to your changing needs as it takes time to hire new team members for your marketing efforts to grow. Also, if you change strategy, you may become overstaffed which will be costly to the business.
However, with outsourced marketing, you can scale your marketing efforts and team with ease and can also free up internal capacity.
Keen to find out more about outsourced marketing?